Debian Weekly News - October 25th, 2005

Welcome to this year's 43rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Jörg Jaspert noticed that the rate of package rejections out of the
NEW queue is rising, mostly due to incomplete copyright files and
suggested to investigate the included files before the upload. Debian users
in Japan will hold Debian mini
conference in Osaka, Japan at the coming weekend (28th and 29th of
October).

Etch Release Progress. Steve Langasek thanked those who have spent large amounts of time on the sarge release and proposed a timeline for
the release of etch. This allows for the
first freeze of the toolchain and kernel in July and a general freeze in
October. Meeting these milestones would then lead to a release of etch in
December 2006.

Port Assignments during System Boot. Gernot Salzer noticed
that some network ports get assigned dynamically during the boot process and
sometimes clash with daemons that use fixed ports. Javier Fernández-Sanguino
Peña explained that the assignment happens inside the GNU C library and started
the portsreserve package to prevent such cases.

Default local Hostname. Christoph Haas discovered
that the local hostname after the installation defaults to
localhost.localdomain instead of just localhost.
Joey Hess explained that the configuration has already been changed after the sarge
release in reaction to Bug#247734.

Plus Signs in Package Names. Andres Salomon intended to rename the binary packages of mysql++ package from libsqlplus1 to libmysql++ since several
users were confused by the older name and wondered if the plus signs could
pose a problem for the packaging tools. Henning Glawe pointed
out that the plus sign has a special meaning for apt-get but
Henning Makholm added
that this doesn't matter here since the soname will have to be added to it
anyway.

S-Lang Module Naming. Rafael Laboissiere noted
that there is currently no policy about naming S-Lang modules. Applications
such as slsh or slrn are prefixed with
"sl" while modules for other languages use the full name of the
language in the package name. He acknowledged to rename the package to slang-gdbm as this module is
more interesting for S-Lang developers.

Pbuilder Status Update. Junichi Uekawa (上川 純一)
reported
that he has moved the development to Alioth as a preparation
for team maintenance and switched to cdebootstrap. For several
distributions dependencies are not resolved
with regards to priorities, though. They could be adjusted en bloc
or during the entire development cycle before the release.

Proposed teTeX Transition. Frank Küster wondered
if there is a possibility to prevent a normal transition for teTeX packages
since the new version 3.0 should be available in unstable but release managers
have asked him not to start another transition at the moment. Andreas Barth
agreed that providing the old library version for a while would help and
not block packages as usual.

New uClibc Ports. Daniel Ruoso is interested
in an i386 port of Debian based on the uClibc instead of the GNU C library for
older and slower hardware. Simon Richter is in need of
a big endian ARM port using uClibc for embedded systems and proposed to
exchange only a small set of packages with their uClibc versions. Riku Voipio
pointed to the woody port using uClibc.

cURL Status Update. Domenico Andreoli updated
the cURL package in the experimental suite so that one variant is linked
against OpenSSL and another is linked against GNU TLS. This will fix license
problems with applications released under the GNU GPL that are indirectly
linked against OpenSSL.

PHP License for PEAR Packages? Piotr Roszatycki wondered
how to handle packages in the Debian archive that use the PHPlicense for something that is
not PHP itself since one such package was rejected from the archive. Jörg
Jaspert pointed out that the license isn't suited for modules and applications
written in or for PHP but only for the core PHP language itself.

New Source Packages and Binaries. Frank Küster noticed
that a new source package that provides existing binary package does not have
to go through NEW processing. This way accidentally overwritten binary packages
won't get noticed before they reach the archive. Jeroen van Wolffelaar explained
that this will soon change.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 7 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 204 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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